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AMD Radeon Gallium3D Starting To Out-Run Catalyst In Some Cases

In this article are benchmarks of the past two Ubuntu Long-Term Support releases (Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS and Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS) compared to the latest Ubuntu 13.04 development state. Being looked at specifically for this round of testing is the AMD Radeon Linux graphics performance with the latest open-source driver compared to an older Catalyst driver. For an AMD Radeon HD 4800 series graphics card, the current state of the open-source graphics driver on Linux is beginning to outperform an old AMD Catalyst driver from 2010 for select Linux OpenGL games.

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Yes, closed source drivers are faster. Yes Catalyst was used from 3 years ago and I'm sure performance has gone up since then. No these tests aren't perfect. But one thing that I do appreciate is Michael including 10.04.4 because it does show just how far the Radeon driver has come in the last 3 years. Its proof that open-source drivers can work outside of just Intel, that the community can do a whole hell of a lot.

I've stopped using radeon, I think i'm going to stick to intel unless I do another desktop build just because I REALLY appreciate Chris Wilson's "Release early, release often" approach with the driver. With that being said though, I tip my hat off to Marek, to David Airlie, to every member of AMD's OSS-graphics team. If I ever see you guys at a conference, I owe each of you a beer

PS: If there's another big-name contributor to radeon / radeon-drm / radeon-kernel that has done a lot with fixing the driver up that I didn't think of off the top of my head (marek and David were the only 2), I owe you a beer as well

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PS: If there's another big-name contributor to radeon / radeon-drm / radeon-kernel that has done a lot with fixing the driver up that I didn't think of off the top of my head (marek and David were the only 2), I owe you a beer as well

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Yea, the results sure are impressive. I still remember how r600g gave excellent performance in UT2004 on medium-high settings a year back, and nowadays it would be even better. Now my R700 card is used for videos only, but even here it's very impressive - full HD content is shown on screen without any stuttering, even when the card is set on the low profile (which it is pretty much permanently for me now, as there is no more reason to go any higher).